As Canada’s population ages, more seniors are moving into long-term care (LTC) and retirement homes, providing tailwinds to a sector that the pandemic heavily destabilized, an industry CEO says.

Nitin Jain, president and CEO of Sienna Senior Living, told BNN Bloomberg that his company’s properties, which include both LTC and retirement homes, are nearing full capacity thanks to steady demand.

“The demographic we serve is 85-plus, and that demographic is one of the fastest growing in Canada at the moment,” Jain said in a Thursday television interview.

“Long-term care homes, which is 50 per cent of our business, they're all full, they have a long waiting list, and retirement homes now are projected to be occupied at 96 or 97 per cent in a couple of years.”

Jain said supply challenges are also affecting occupancy at his company’s properties, as high interest rates and construction costs limit the amount of new homes being built.

Lower rates and increased government funding should help spur more development in the future, Jain said, but he added that Sienna Senior Living is “still building” despite the current economic headwinds.

“We have around $300 million in development; we built a brand new retirement home in Niagara Falls… and we have two massive developments in Brantford and North Bay, and we have other projects in the pipeline,” he said.

'Stability is back'

Jain said that after the sudden destabilization brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the senior care industry has regained some normalcy, but it was difficult at first to convince analysts and investors of that fact, he said.

“We've been talking since (the first quarter) of last year saying that stability is back and we are now going to grow on that stability, and no one believed us in Q1,” Jain said.

“Then we had four quarters of not only going back to previous stability, but building on top of it, and we finally started to see analysts saying the company has now stabilized.”

Jain said that in addition to strong occupancy numbers, the amount of available staff to work in senior homes has also returned to 2019 levels and that the workforce is “very engaged.”

He said investors are now increasingly jumping back into the senior care space, after many had been hesitant over the past four years due to ongoing pandemic-related challenges.

“We are hearing more from those investors who were probably sitting on the sidelines,” Jain said.